Session 2A
Title: Adapting the Course Book: Maximising Opportunities for Communicative Practice

Abstract:
It is accepted that in the ESL classroom today, communicative practice is as important as a focus on form – the grammar and structures of our language. A significant number of popular, commercially available ESL course books provide limited opportunities to develop communicative competence in the ways described by early proponents of communicative language teaching (CLT). This workshop presents a range of activities for adapting typical course book lessons in order to extend and develop communicative competence for learners, while addressing the need for accuracy at the lexico/grammatical level. The additional benefits of CLT, for example learner engagement and autonomy, will be addressed. Working examples of course book adaptation, resulting in more opportunities for personalised practice, will also be demonstrated. Two communicative approaches, the jigsaw and peer-teaching, are the focus of this workshop.

Bio
Orlando Savage is a level leader and teacher at UTS:Insearch. He is a co-author of the AE course books and currently develops supplementary materials for online delivery. Orlando is interested in creating educational content that is engaging, personalised and widely used. He holds a BA Communications / BA International Studies combined degree (UTS) and is undertaking a Masters of Management at the Macquarie Graduate School of Management.